Stef's Blog - a native London Southlander and unrepentant 'Conspiraloon™' who doesn't trust anyone, not even himself. Sometimes I take pictures. I also enjoy swearing immensely and think much faster than I can type, so each post comes guaranteed to include at last one confusing typo. OK?

22 comments:

I have a pal whose analysis of the property market is subtly flawed. He patiently explains to me that it's all about supply and demand and that there's a huge demand for housing, in other words, a re-hash of pig-dog Kirsty's argument.

The flaw in the argument comes from its lack of accuracy. It's not the supply and demand of property, instead, it's the supply and demand of credit.

Imagine a hundred empty houses and a thousand homeless families. If the poorest of the families can get a mortgage for GBP200k; that's the price of the cheapest of the one hundred houses.

Imagine the same set up but with only ten of these one thousand homeless families being able to get credit. If the maximum amount of credit available to the 'richest' of these ten families is GBP100K this is the price of the most expensive of these one hundred houses.

I know that as I write here I'm preaching to the converted. I know that the obviousness of the point may even become tiresome. But trying to explain this to almost everyone else I know ... is such a chore that I needed to say it here.

Michael Hudson from my earlier link once complained that a lot of the best economics students he encountered gave up economics (as it is currently being taught) to do something else - because their motivation for studying economics in the first place was to learn how the world worked

I lived in Dublin in the early 2000s, when many new sprawling estates were being built all over. Prices could go up 30% from one week to the next for low quality flats that were not even finished. Two years after, most of these flats and houses were already falling apart(including mine but I was renting). I remember power cuts because a whole new estate nearby had been connected without any form of planning or authorization, and whole areas totally ruined after heavy rains because they were built up on floodplains. Etc.Anybody with a job in Ireland seemed to have a house and a car on a 20 years mortgage.

I was over there a couple of times in the 90s and marveled at all the lovely, new gleaming EU roads and infrastructure going from nowhere, to nowhere

I also recall that everyone I met below a certain age seemed to work in customer support for large multinationals. I recall asking a few of them what they thought would happened when another country played Ireland at its own game and undercut their country. They hadn't thought about it very much

it doesn't matter what you use provided the supply of money/ credit is managed transparently and honestly

Going back to the famous (on the Internet anyway) Jefferson quote...

"If the American people ever allow private banks to control issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and the corporations will grow up around them, will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs."

Jefferson doesn't specify what the money actually is, just who controls its supply

All this stuff was sussed out centuries ago and people have spent the last couple forgetting about it

the problem with gold or silver, as I've mentioned before, is that the supply of those commodities has already been sewn up long ago

love this line from the Wikipedia entry on fractional reserve banking...

"A full-reserve banking system with a fixed money supply would result in deflation as the economy grows. However, this deflation is likely to have deleterious consequences if some prices are stickier than others; in particular, wages are often significantly stickier than other prices. Most economists believe that given wage stickiness, the adjustment costs of deflation are significantly higher than an equivalent inflation. As such, mainstream economic thinking prefers the inflation brought about by fractional-reserve banking to the necessary deflation of a full-reserve banking policy regime."

which, translated into English, says 'mainstream economic thinking prefers that the purchasing power of ordinary people's wages does not increase as the economy does '

you were on the money choosing silver over gold, as silver has heaps of industrial uses and gets consumed as fast as it's being extracted, some say faster

gold is an altogether more peculiar, faith based, option

I don't fundamentally disagree with what you are saying but all I am saying is that if the system you live under is managed by crooks it doesn't matter what is used as currency, they'll find some way to manipulate the supply - be it paper, shiny stuff or beans

and if we moved over to a gold-backed system tomorrow I'm quite confident that there would be all sorts of surprises when it came to discovering who really held how much gold where

"Notice: Chinatungsten Online (Xiamen) Manu.&Sales Corp. is a very professional and serious company, specializing in manufacturing and selling tungsten related products for more than two decades. Our gold-plated tungsten alloy products are only for souvenir and decoration purpose. Here we declare: Please do not use our gold-plated tungsten alloy products for illegal purpose."

I was arguing with some professionals about living off the land versus remaining in the current paradigm and working for fiat GBP (notwithstanding issues surrounding recruitment). Their beef was that a) not enough land exists in the UK for the former and b) that it would be harder work, leaving the individual poorer.

`Charles Geisst, Professor of Finance at Manhattan College, has recounted how Greenspan undermined the Glass-Steagall Act first as a JP Morgan director and then as Chair of the Federal Reserve: “When he [Greenspan] was a director of J.P. Morgan & Company in the 1980s, Morgan produced a pamphlet called "Rethinking Glass-Steagall," in 1984, which he was obviously privy to and had contributed to…The pamphlet was advocating getting rid of the Glass-Steagall Act and the separation between commercial and investment banking, so that commercial bankers particularly could begin to underwrite corporate securities again, as they hadn't done since before 1933.” [19]`

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